Book One: The Olive Branch Part Five: The Peace of Boston Characters
Chapter Thirty-six
The Answer
Richard Penn. Falmouth, in the Kingdom of Great Britain. Tuesday, 3 August 1779.
Negotiations opened as the North ministry fell and the incoming moderates sought terms, and as Congress, exhausted and near bankruptcy, moved toward the same conclusion.
He had the orders in a flat case under his coat.
He noticed it on the quay at Falmouth, waiting for the boat, with the packet lying out in the roads beyond Pendennis and the whole town full of soldiers: that he had put the case in the same place, against the same side, under the same coat, as if four years had not happened. His hand had done it in the inn that morning without consulting him. He thought of taking it out and putting it somewhere else, and found that there was nowhere else; and stood on the quay in the sun with his hand over it, as he had stood at the rail of the Mary and Elizabeth coming up the river in the August of seventy-five, and was not sure whether to laugh.
It was not his. That was the difference. The other paper had been his, in a way; he had believed every word of it, and been sent with it by men he had known all his life, and stood in an anteroom for a week for the right to put it into a minister’s hand. This one he had not read. It was sealed with the seal of a Secretary of State and addressed to His Excellency Sir Henry Clinton, Knight of the Bath, Commander-in-Chief of His Majesty’s forces in North America, at New York, and it had Lord Shelburne’s name inside it, and the King’s leave, and he did not know a word of what it said except what Lord Shelburne had chosen to tell him.
Which was, he thought, as much as anybody had ever told him about anything; and more, very likely, than was safe.
Lord Shelburne had sent for him on the nineteenth of July, five days after the new men kissed hands, to the big house in Berkeley Square.
Penn had never been in it. He had been in a good many great houses in four years, in the way of an American gentleman in London with a name everybody knew, and he had come to judge them by how long they kept him waiting; and Lord Shelburne kept him waiting not at all. A servant took his hat at the door, and another took him up the stairs, and a third opened a door at the top of them, and there was Lord Shelburne in a long room full of books and marbles, coming across it with his hand out, and a smile that Penn had heard about and found, now that he saw it, that he did not trust either, and could not have said why.
“Mr Penn,” said Lord Shelburne. “You will forgive my sending for you so abruptly. I have been in office five days and married for ten, and I find that neither condition leaves a man any time for manners.”
He was forty-two, a big handsome man with heavy eyelids and a soft voice, who had been Lord Chatham’s friend and was now, people said, his heir, and who had more enemies in the House of Lords than any man in it except, possibly, the Archbishop of York. He gave Penn a chair. He did not sit himself. He walked about the long room among his marbles while he talked, touching them sometimes as he passed, a hand on a shoulder, a finger along a nose, as another man might touch his dogs.
He said that His Majesty’s new servants were determined to put an end to the war in America. He said it as plainly as that, and then stopped by a bust of somebody in a toga and looked at Penn to see how he took it.
Penn took it without moving. He had learned that in London too.
Lord Shelburne went on. He said that the King had been pleased to approve it. He did not say how, and Penn did not ask. He said that a letter was going to Sir Henry Clinton at New York, by a sure hand, empowering him to propose to General Washington a cessation of arms; that Sir Henry was to write first, under a flag of truce, and to name a place where the two of them might agree it; that the ministry thought Boston a likely place, since both armies had been sitting in it for most of a year without killing each other, though Sir Henry was to use his own judgement. He said that commissioners would follow, to treat with the Congress; and that Mr Hartley, who had been corresponding with Dr Franklin at Passy for a year about the prisoners, had been asked to write to Dr Franklin about other things.
“And the Parliament,” said Penn.
He had not meant to say it. It came out of him the way a thing comes out of a man who has waited four years to say it to somebody who could answer.
Lord Shelburne looked at him for a moment with his heavy-lidded eyes.
“That,” he said, “is what the commissioners will be for. I will not tell you we mean to give them everything they ask, Mr Penn, because nobody could, and you would not believe me if I did. We are committed to a peace within the Crown. We are committed to asking them, in good faith, what that is to mean; and to listening, which is more than they have had from London in four years.” He smiled again, the smile Penn did not trust. “And we are committed to asking them quickly, before the French and the Spaniards ask us something else. There is a fleet at sea that is not ours.”
“Why me, my lord?”
“Because you carried the other thing.” Shelburne said it as though it were obvious, and perhaps it was. “Because the Americans know your face, and the Congress sent you, and it will be remembered on both sides that the King’s ministers sent you back. Because you are not a soldier, nor a commissioner, nor a placeman of mine, and nobody can say that you went for what you could get.” He paused. “And because you will not open it. I have made inquiries about you, Mr Penn. Everybody I asked told me the same thing, in nearly the same words. They said that you carried a paper across the Atlantic in seventy-five under your coat, and took it out twice a day to look at the seal, and never once broke it.”
Penn felt his face go hot. He had not known that anybody knew that. He supposed Lee had told somebody, years ago, at a dinner, as a joke.
“It was not mine to break,” he said.
“Nor is this.” Shelburne went to the table and took up a packet and held it out to him. “You will sail from Falmouth. The packet goes on the third. You will forgive me if I say that I would rather you were out of the Channel before the end of the first week in August than after it.”
At the door, when Penn had his hat and his packet and was going, Shelburne said one more thing, with his hand on the frame, in a lower voice.
“Lord Dartmouth left me a paper. On his last morning. A list of what the department owed and had not paid. I have read it twice.” He looked past Penn at the stairs. “He put the Mohawks at the top. I have not yet decided what to do about the Mohawks. I thought you would like to know that there was somebody in that office who put them at the top.”
Penn did not know what to say to that, and said nothing, and went down the stairs.
Polly packed for him. She would not let the maid do it.
She was twenty-three now, and had been in England four years, and had a son who had never seen America and talked about it as though it were a place in a story, and she had not lost a word of her Philadelphia; and she went about the bedroom in the house they had taken, folding his shirts and arguing with him about his stockings, and talked the whole time, as she did when she did not want to say something, about everything else.
She said that he was to wear the flannel next his skin whatever the captain said, and that he was not to eat the pork after the second week, and that her mother had written by way of Amsterdam to say that General Arnold was living in the house in Market Street in very great style and had married the youngest Miss Shippen in April and was paying nobody anything; and that if Richard should happen to be within ninety miles of Philadelphia he was to go and look at the house and see whether there was anything left of it.
“I am going to New York, Polly. To Sir Henry.”
“New York is ninety miles from Philadelphia. I have looked at the map.” She put a shirt into the trunk and smoothed it flat with both hands. “I have looked at it a good deal, lately.”
He came and stood behind her and put his hands on her shoulders, and she stopped smoothing the shirt.
“I will not be long,” he said. “It is a letter. I give it to Sir Henry and come home on the next packet.”
“You said that in seventy-five.” She did not turn round. “You said you would give a letter to the King and come home on the next packet. And here we are, four years after, and the boy thinks Philadelphia is in a book.” Then she did turn round, and put her face against his coat, just where the case would be, and said into it, in a voice he could hardly hear: “It is the answer, isn’t it. The one you waited for.”
“I think it may be.”
“Then go and give it to them,” said Polly, “and come home.”
The packet weighed on the evening tide, with the light going and the wind fair at north-east, and stood out past St Anthony’s head with the soldiers’ fires coming out one by one along the cliffs behind her; and Penn stood at the rail and watched England go, as he had watched it come four years ago, and found that he could not have said, honestly, which way he was going.
She was a brig of about two hundred tons, built for speed and not for comfort, with a dozen small guns that were for show and a captain who said so; a lean brown Cornishman who had been in the packet service twenty years and taken the mail to New York and Lisbon and Barbados and had it taken from him only once, off the Azores, by a Boston privateer, in seventy-seven. He explained the rules to Penn on the first evening, very civilly, over a glass of wine in his cabin, as one explains the rules of a house. A packet ran when she could. She fought when she could no longer run. And when she could fight no longer, she sank the mail before she struck; and the mail, he said, looking at Penn’s coat, meant everything that came aboard her under the King’s seal, whoever was carrying it.
“There is a bag,” said the captain. “It has pig iron in it. It lives by the after port. You will forgive me, sir, if I ask you to know where it is.”
Penn said that he would know where it was.
They saw the fleet on the second day.
It was a little after ten in the morning, with the Lizard thirty leagues astern and the wind gone round into the west and light, so that the brig was close-hauled and making very little way; and the lookout sang out, and then sang out again in a different voice, and the captain went up the mainmast shrouds himself with a glass, a thing Penn had not seen him do, and was a long time coming down.
There were sails to the southward. At first a dozen, white flecks against the haze; then the brig rose on a swell and there were thirty. Penn stopped counting. The fleet stretched along the horizon, standing towards the mouth of the Channel, towards Plymouth and Falmouth and the coast where the soldiers’ fires had been: sixty sail of the line, perhaps, French and Spanish together, with their frigates and transports.
“Theirs,” said the captain, coming down. “Ours is to the westward somewhere, I’m told, looking for it. It has not found it.” He looked at the sky, and at the sails, and at his own. “They have seen us. Two frigates have come out of the line, there and there. We will see what she can do with the wind abeam.”
They went about, and ran to the northward.
It was the longest day of Penn’s life, and he did nothing in it at all. There was nothing for a passenger to do. He stood by the after port, out of the way, where the bag lived, with his back against the bulwark and his hand on his coat, and watched the two frigates come up out of the south, very slowly and then not slowly, until he could see the white of the water at their bows and the colours at their mizzen peaks, which were white too. The brig’s people set everything she had and wet her sails with buckets to make them draw. The captain stood by the wheel and said nothing to anybody. At about three in the afternoon the nearer frigate fired a gun, which fell short, and the captain looked at Penn across the deck, and Penn took the case out from under his coat, for the first time since Berkeley Square, and gave it to the seaman at the port, who put it into the bag with the rest, and tied the neck, and sat down beside it, and waited.
He found that he was not afraid, or not of the frigate. He was afraid of the bag. He stood and looked at it, a canvas sack with pig iron in it sitting by an open port, and thought that if the frigate came within range it would go over the side, and the thing that was in it would go down to the bottom of the sea, sealed, unread, with Lord Shelburne’s name inside it; and that the ministry would not know for three months that it had gone, and would have to begin again, and that by then there might be no ministry, and no wish to begin anything, and men would go on being killed in America all the autumn for want of a letter at the bottom of the sea.
He thought: I have carried two papers across this water, and one of them got no answer, and the other may not get there. He thought that if he had been a praying man like Lord Dartmouth he would have prayed, and that perhaps he was, and did.
The frigate came within long range at five, and fired again, and the shot went over, through the brig’s rigging, and cut a backstay, and the men cheered, for some reason; and then the wind, which had been dying all afternoon, freshened with the evening, as the captain had said it might, and the brig, which was lighter and cleaner and had been built for nothing else, began very slowly to draw away. The frigate held on until dark. When the light went they doused every lantern in the ship and went about again to the westward, and in the morning the sea was empty from one side of the sky to the other.
The seaman untied the bag and gave him back the case. Penn put it under his coat, in the same place, and stood at the rail for a long time looking back to the north-east, where the fleet had been going: towards the Channel, and Plymouth, and the house where Polly was, and the boy, who thought Philadelphia was in a book, and who had been born in England.
The crossing took six weeks after that, and nothing in it happened, which the captain said was the best thing that could be said of any crossing.
They went south of west, out of the way of the cruisers, into long blue swells where flying fish came aboard in the night and lay on the deck like dropped knives. The pork went bad in the third week, as Polly had said it would, and Penn did not eat it. He read his three books twice. In the evenings he walked with the captain and the only other passenger, an ensign of the 37th, seventeen, who was sick for a fortnight and then asked questions about America until Penn wished he had brought more books.
“Are they very like us, sir?” said the ensign one evening, at the rail, with the sun going down ahead of them.
Penn thought about it.
“They are exactly like us,” he said. “That is the whole of the difficulty.”
They raised the land on the morning of the fourteenth of September: a long low blue shadow on the western sea, very faint, that the ensign said was cloud and the captain said was the Highlands of Navesink, and the captain was right.
It came up out of the water by degrees all the morning, green and then brown and then green again, the long ridge of the highlands with the woods on them, and the low white line of the beach running north from them to the Hook; and then, a little after noon, the lighthouse on the Hook, white, standing up out of the dunes like a finger, with a flag on the staff beside it that Penn could not make out at that distance and did not need to, because he knew whose it was. There were ships in the lower bay, a great many of them, lying at anchor with their sails furled: the King’s ships, and the transports, and the store ships, and the little armed boats of the refugees, who held the lighthouse and the beach and went out from them at night to do things nobody talked about. The pilot boat came out to them through the swell with a lugsail and four men at the oars.
The pilot came up the side with a bundle of New York newspapers under his arm, as pilots always did, and a great deal of news, as pilots always had, most of it untrue; and he shook hands with the captain, and looked at the ensign, and looked at Penn, standing at the rail in his good coat with his hand over the case under it, as it had been for six weeks.
“And who’s this gentleman?” said the pilot.
“Mr Penn,” said the captain. “A passenger. With dispatches for Sir Henry.”
“Penn.” The pilot looked at him again with more interest, a short brown New York man with a face like a walnut. “Any relation to the Pennsylvania Penns, sir?”
“I am one of them.”
“Are you, now.” The pilot considered this, and him, and the coat, and evidently decided that the gentleman would do. “Then you’ll be from there,” he said, comfortably, meaning nothing by it at all, and went aft to the wheel to take her in over the bar.
Penn stood at the rail and watched the lighthouse come up on the larboard bow, and the low green shore beyond it, and the bay opening, and the hills of Staten Island blue in the haze beyond the bay; and he found that he was smiling, and could not stop, and did not try.